Anorak, an entertainment technology company split between London and Chengdu, has closed a $5 million pre-seed funding round to develop AI-powered interactive experiences that communities can shape around their own passions. Play Ventures and Backed VC co-led the round, joined by investors including Supercell and MTG.
The company operates under the mission of "making any pursuit playable" and is led by Shaun Rutland as CEO, who previously co-founded Hutch, the mobile gaming studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash before its 2020 acquisition by MTG. Jonathan Alpine, who served as founding employee and Chief Creative Officer at Hutch, holds the Chief Creative Officer role at Anorak. Tak Fung, the company's Chief of AI, oversees the research lab based in Chengdu.
What began as a research initiative into generative video has evolved into a platform with 20 staff members working across both offices. Anorak is developing proprietary inference technology designed to accelerate generative video production, reduce costs and increase control, enabling a shift from pre-rendered content toward real-time, generative gameplay.
The company's core innovation centres on interactive generative video—video content that responds to player choices and inputs instantaneously. Rather than retrofitting AI onto existing game formats, Anorak is constructing entirely new interaction patterns and the underlying platform to support them. The approach merges human imagination and creativity with AI-driven generation and visual rendering to create an entertainment medium that is simultaneously playable, viewable and shareable.
Lessons from Hutch's success inform Anorak's strategy. The team observed how deeply engaged enthusiasts become within niche communities—car lovers didn't merely play games but cultivated communities around minute details and established their own benchmarks. Anorak extends this insight across countless subcultures: fishing communities, sneaker collectors, padel enthusiasts, bird watchers, K-pop devotees and thousands of other groups that conventional game publishers would never fund titles for.
Generative technology fundamentally reshapes the financial model for reaching these underserved audiences. By making content production economically viable for niche interests, Anorak can bring interactive formats to increasingly specific communities that traditional game development economics have historically ignored.
The vision extends beyond simply providing tools to developers. Anorak intends to place creation capabilities directly into the hands of real-world communities, enabling them to produce content shaped by their own inside references, traditions and aesthetic preferences rather than corporate assumptions about mass-market appeal. In a landscape where creation becomes increasingly accessible, Anorak contends that taste—the ability to curate and filter—becomes the genuine bottleneck, and communities possessing that taste should both direct creation and participate as creators themselves.
The company is currently releasing experimental playable prototypes weekly through its blog, with a creator platform launch scheduled for early 2027 that will enable broader participation in content creation.
The creation process itself won't resemble conventional chatbot interfaces that transform text prompts into games. Anorak maintains that the act of making should be as engaging as playing—fundamentally about enjoying the process of creating enjoyment. According to Shaun Rutland:
Every time making got cheaper – in music, film and games – value moved to whoever had the taste to filter the flood. Generative is the biggest of those shifts yet, because almost anyone can now create. Anorak is about giving every community that power: real people making playable things for the people they actually care about.
Shaun Rutland, CEO and co-founder, Anorak
Harri Manninen, Founding Partner at Play Ventures, characterises Anorak as pioneering a fresh category of interactive entertainment by transforming generative video into content that audiences can engage with, observe and distribute.
What makes the vision especially compelling is the opportunity not only to build for passionate communities, but to empower those communities to create entertainment around their own interests. Shaun, Jonathan and Tak combine a proven track record in entertainment with deep AI expertise, exactly the kind of team we want to back at the beginning of a new technology cycle.
Harri Manninen, Founding Partner, Play Ventures
Alex Brunicki, Founding Partner at Backed VC, observes that most AI-focused entertainment ventures are leveraging new technology to accelerate conventional formats.
Anorak is asking a far more interesting question: what does entertainment look like when content is made by and for a community, especially if we shift away from the skeuomorphism that other companies are still approaching the space with? Furthermore, the technical breakthroughs the team have made in the past 12 months make us extremely excited for what comes next with Anorak.
Alex Brunicki, Founding Partner, Backed VC
The capital injection will support expansion of both the London and Chengdu operations, facilitate the launch of initial playable formats, and establish the creator platform ahead of its early 2027 debut.
Source: Tech.eu
